Diptyque - Tam Dao

Sprayed on my watch and fabric, this is the heavenliest, creamiest sandalwood, silken and voluptuous, like swimming in a vatful of custard. It lasted a full week.
On skin, however, it doesn't exist. Disappeared into the ether, or somehow got deflected off my wrist. A tremendous disappointment.

EDIT JUNE 4: A tingling cassia red hot sweetness that prickles my tongue, crossed with an Ikea manufacturing plant. Something is wrong with my hormones these days - I can see why in medieval Europe menstruating women were kept away from dairies. This is the second time I've hoped for Tam Dao to replicate the unforgettable milkiness I fell in love with - now all I get is a flurry of love-bites - where is the doe-eyed sandalwood my dreams are made of?

Thierry Mugler - Alien

Uninspired floral with the most hideous marketing campaign on earth.

Etat Libre d'Orange - Eloge du Traitre

Beautifully done men's fougere, with a spicy, cuminous edge. Evades all cliches of men's perfumery (fresh, watery, sporty) and exists in its own elegant sphere of dove grey and slate blue. Vegetal without verdancy. Dusky, resinous, wonderful.
10/10.

Keiko Mecheri - Ume

This is the happiest perfume on earth. Plump Victorian lasses writing New Year's greetings sealed with jonquil-coloured wax, a hundred cups of mulled wine being raised aloft and tinkling, very dainty wholesome cheer. This is the first flush of Orientalism in the West, Earl Grey sipped from a china tea-service painted with frail-flower beauties. Alas, my sister said it's very Euphoric - her signature scent! This Lillie Langtry in scent will adorn my clothes, then.

Comptoir Sud Pacifique - Vanille Amande

. . . and all the teeth drop out of my head, riddled by suppurating sores and diabetic shock.

L'Artisan Parfumeur - Dzing!

Rubber, black leather, motorcycle goggles, sawdust, moist paper pulp. Affecting and odd, like Sylvia Bourdon's trysts on a Harley-Davidson, the death-defying stunts of the visitor in Radley Metzger's The Lickerish Quartet, and the hallucinations of the acid-soaked Girl On a Motorcycle. Petrol, danger, sweaty palms gripping shiny handles. In an hour heady benzoin and caramel notes emerge - the olfactory equivalent of a Victorian topsy-turvy doll. 7/10.

Serge Lutens - Miel de Bois

My compliments to Christopher Sheldrake for making this astonishing beauty, which resembles no other perfume on earth. I'm still literally catching my breath, so my words will come out all scattershot . . . Honey removed of all its Winnie-the-Pooh connotations, it's honey made from hemlock and toxins, nux vomica, folktales of wooden babies turned into ravenous monsters (see Otesanek), wooden teeth gnashing you to bits, ohmygod I can't believe this exists, STING STING STING, I'm going to bathe in this by the vatful, OH! but I am in love.